I had similar issues, I would get frustrated and moody when trying to push my brain too much with recall or memory, oddly enough every other faculty seems to be fully functional and no other issues, sometimes I actually get lost driving, or don't remember who or where I am.. It can be kind of frightening at times but there is only so much you can do sometimes.

It is definitely a blood flow issue for most seeing as there is a high degree of hypo perfusion in chronic illness like Lyme, Mold toxicity, CFS, etc..

The other issue could be due to suddle inflammation and a chronic mild encephalitic state of the brain which is another issue for some people, the best thing I have done for it is an enzyme blend called inflamezyme which has all the necessary nutrients to promote excellent blood flow to the brain and organs, alongside Ginkgo Bilobia, PQQ, CoQ10, Acetyl L carnatine Fumarate, Methyl b12, and Methyl folate..

Recently I started trying to force myself to remember the sequence of events in a movie and it's working but it's hurting my head.

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I dont recommend doing that at all if you have ME. I think working our heads hard is causing inflammation in our brains. I know it certainly feels like my brain inflames if I push it to work, I think it may be pushing us into an mild encephalitis state.

Not only that, it can also like crash our brains to the point in which we will be far less functional in our thinking for that day or the next few days and have our brains like "shut down" (anyone who has experienced an extreme brain shut down will know just how scary that can be.. it can leave you unable to even do speech or understand language).

It makes the brain exercise kind of worthless if one is then left afterwards not being able to use the brain as much as normal.

Pushing brains can not just cause a brain crash but can also cause a full ME/CFS crash so that a persons whole symptom complex can hit.

Anyway long story short, Ive found that to work my brain only makes it a lot worst (I no longer do puzzles for that reason as its certainly not good for my brain). (that's without ever refering to the "brain strain" and headache it can give too).

Forcing your brain to work and expecting brain improvement from that, is like a ME person doing aerobics and expecting that to increase what you can do.

My neuropsych assessment I think shocked the assessor, it showed my brain going backwards in memory the more I worked it, till I was 4 times worst then when I started (when with repeat words I was supposed to remember, I should of been actually improving but with each round of repeating the same words to aid my memory but it just got worst till I could only repeat straight back 2 out of 50 words (at the start I could repeat back about 8).

There is a phenomena I have observed occasionally in patients who have been sick more than three years, and very common in patients over ten years ill. We start rehearsing what happened to us. We tell ourselves the important things. We scan the environment and note what is important. We analyze things. Those things we do this for we remember better. Everything else goes away. I have commented on this before.

I think its a memory trick. We use verbal memory, what is called semantic memory, to recall things. This describes me anyway, and it fits the patients I have discussed this with. I have called it partial progressive episodic amnesia. What we have is not dementia, it is more amnesia-like than dementia-like.

This is of course speculation, not scientific fact, but its what I see.

We have both brain hypoperfusion and hypometabolism. Neurons demand energy, and lots of it. Even a slight loss of energy function in a region of the brain will put that part of the brain into a dormant state. The brain can then rewire to give that part of the brain much less priority, which I do not want to see happen. Fortunately the entire brain doesn't rewire like that, but I am unsure of the extent and pattern of brain rewiring.

I get what you mean by exercising a brain that actually needs more rest. I've been using glucose tablets for several months to help me think and exert myself but I'm definitely not thinking like my pre cfs self.

The reason I wanted to try this is that I just moved a few months ago and thought since I'm capable of learning new roads I might benefit from this. My frustration / stress level while learning this area has been high tho. Even with phone mapping.

I was just thinking about this particular one this morning. I absolutely can identify and also watch things over and over as well as what Alex mentioned with the rehearsing and analysing. In the distant past it caused me some despair as I felt like an outlier and not very normal.

I am fortunate in that I was able to have a family before becoming severely incapacitated. Although the flip side to that is I cannot recollect most of the past including my children growing up. There are some memories I have that are 'factual', we went here and did that but they may as well be some one else's memories, they are not tied to anything. For example remembering the smell of salt air or colours and sounds the emotion of enjoyment in that moment. Even the factual rememberance is scarce, I have to work to reconstruct the what happened when.

I am taking Ginkgo Biloba which is said to enhance neurology and blood flow. I know Dr Best´s one is helping me to sleep slightly better and I feel the blood flow pushin the sexual area mostly . My mind is still pretty "demented" though, the past is scarce and the present feels unreal (as people have commented past also feels unreal, or untied to me). I never was a normal kid but colours, flavours and experiences in general were much more pronounced and vivid when I was physically healthy. I think back then my memories were normal, cannot remember!

ALCAR also seemed to boost a lot my memory power two years ago when I was attempting an university career. Did sleep like 4 hours the day before and got a 10 in one exam go figure!!! My writing was AWFUL though, couldn´t believe someone would give a ten to that. Dr Best brand again, cheap and reliable in my experience.

This describes me exactly. I routinely find notes to myself that I have no recollection of writing and upon re-reading, have no idea what the information means or where I got it. Before becoming housebound, I, too, got lost driving familiar routes and forgot where I was. On bad days, I lose the kind of memory that tells me things like where to put a stamp on a letter. It's scary.

@Snowdrop, the loss of memories of raising my kids is particularly painful. They were in their teens when I fell ill and could no longer be the kind of mother I wanted to be. I feel the need to repeatedly tell them what I do remember before that, too, is gone. When I look at photos, it's as if I'm remembering the photo rather than the event, as I have no context information.

Meanwhile, I can't forget the videos of the stroke patients who get an injection of etanercept and regain function. I guess it's because I've rehearsed what something like that would be like for this community!

My brain is still fried but I have 2 funny dementia stories to tell.
I'm stuck on trying to understand alex's post. I'm sure it's just brain fog.

I was at a store recently when an elderly lady demanded to speak with the manager. When the manager arrived and asked what the problem was the lady pointed out a woman and responded " That woman over there refused to help me get a dressing room." At which point the manager said "She doesn't work here". Yeh, it was obvious.

When at a doctors office last week, an 80+ year old woman who was waiting in the waiting room with a freind asked the receptionist if she could use the ladies room because the restroom was in a separate area. When she came back she replied to her friend " Oh, I see you've changed into shorts since we got here". Nope. He never moved.

I can just hear me saying something very similiar.

I was at a freinds the other day and said "Don't worry about cleaning my dish. I'll get it when I get back". Only I wasn't going anywhere. Lol.

But, is part of the problem the fact that most everything I see or hear happens to quickly for me to process ? Oddly, I don't feel like my driving has been affected by my slowed thought process. Ok. Lol. I just sounded like every other old driver out there.

I can't keep up with most news broadcasts on tv. Conversations with most people result in me pretending I understood because if I don't the other person is really going to confuse me by repeating what they said.

Sooo ... my brain is still trying to process the last thing that happened and can't process any more. Circuit overload ?

But, is part of the problem the fact that most everything I see or hear happens to quickly for me to process ? Oddly, I don't feel like my driving has been affected by my slowed thought process. Ok. Lol. I just sounded like every other old driver out there.

I can't keep up with most news broadcasts on tv. Conversations with most people result in me pretending I understood because if I don't the other person is really going to confuse me by repeating what they said.

Sooo ... my brain is still trying to process the last thing that happened and can't process any more. Circuit overload ?

Tx ... x

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For me certainly part of my memory issues is due to my inability to process things fast enough so I only ever pick up half the info in the first place.

Your driving.. with your brain like how you've just described, you really should be worrying about your driving. I was doing all kinds of stupid things while I was driving and wasnt even aware I was doing so. Fortunately I was living in a small country town so it started getting back to me of things others were seeing me do.. very scary really.

I was driving throu stop signs and that without having any awareness at all I was doing so.. once again.. my brain couldnt process everything eg that the signs were there before I passed them or what they meant fast enough. Take care, you could be driving very bad and not even know it!. I ended up having two different people in one week tell me that they saw me drive throu a stop sign (these were in separate incidences about my town).

But, is part of the problem the fact that most everything I see or hear happens to quickly for me to process ? Oddly, I don't feel like my driving has been affected by my slowed thought process. Ok. Lol. I just sounded like every other old driver out there.

I can't keep up with most news broadcasts on tv. Conversations with most people result in me pretending I understood because if I don't the other person is really going to confuse me by repeating what they said.

Sooo ... my brain is still trying to process the last thing that happened and can't process any more. Circuit overload ?

Tx ... x

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On second life we used to use voice chat a lot. Then we wound up with people who could not handle voice, and others who could not handle text chat. In time we gravitated to text chat, as text gave us a chance to keep up with the conversation, because we could scroll back.

Sadly we lost at least one person who cannot handle text, but several who cannot handle voice found things easier.

I was forced to give up driving over two decades ago now. There are not problems until there is an emergency, and then you might be very slow reacting to it.

My first thought though when I started experiencing this was that it was a sort of noise interference. I have tinnitus and over the years it has become louder. Then I got to thinking that maybe it wasn't louder but only seemed so. Maybe my brain had been filtering out the noise to some extent and now it can't do so as well anymore.

So I'm thinking that maybe a few things are going on with the inability to keep up. We are processing things more slowly but also we are unable to filter things (a somewhat vague idea, I'm not even quite sure of what I mean).

And it can definitely be made worse by stress. Just as we were in the midst of packing/moving from Vancouver back to Toronto I had an episode where I was standing talking with someone at my bank branch and all of a sudden as they were talking I couldn't understand what they were saying. Completely. It sounded like gibberish. It was quite upsetting. Not the same thing as slow processing I know but the message is the same. . . take care of yourself. Weird stuff happens with ME.

My first thought though when I started experiencing this was that it was a sort of noise interference. I have tinnitus and over the years it has become louder. Then I got to thinking that maybe it wasn't louder but only seemed so. Maybe my brain had been filtering out the noise to some extent and now it can't do so as well anymore.

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I have a lot of noise in my brain. I had tinnitus for years in one ear because of a botched surgery, but this is very different. I can hear my blood flow, my pulse, and a continuous dull roar. It's one of my most maddening symptoms.

I know that my brain is inflamed. I feel it and I hear it. Try telling that to a neurologist :/